Tag Archives: kitchen

Never, in my wildest dreams, did I think that when we moved into this house that we would be moving again so quickly! We closed on this house on January 11, 2013. Just three short years ago! And boy, does it look different!

I had a huge To-Do List of projects and am happy to say that we were able to finish most of them and also some that weren’t even on the list. So I thought I would share with you one more look at the before and after photos and what all we did to update the house.

Street View

removed rocks and flowerbeds from around trees

had sod installed around trees

removed all the plants from flowerbeds by the house and planted tropical plants

What a difference a little paint, new kitchen floors, and countertops make! Mr. and I have learned alot these last three years! We now know we can install ceramic tile, hardwood flooring, and carpet, but couldn’t/wouldn’t do it for a living! I have a new found respect for those that do!!

I’ve enjoyed this house, and especially having the swimming pool, but I’m so excited to begin our next journey in our new house! I’ll be sharing pictures of it very soon!

For the last several months, Mr. and I have been talking about buying a vacation home on Galveston Island and renting it out during peak vacation season. But then about two weeks ago, we decided to just jump all in and move to the water full-time! And I am ecstatic! Living in the suburbs of Houston is driving me crazy! 6.6 million people is a huge change from the one stoplight small town of 6.3 thousand people where we lived for 17 years before we started our moves in 2010.

But that means I have to finish all the projects I have going on with the current house. We want to get it on the market as soon as possible, and are thinking the first of December is doable. So I have approximately three weeks to get this place finished, decluttered, and staged! Therefore, a change of plans will need to take place when it comes to all the projects.

I’ve broken everything down into what I hope to get done each week. Yeah, I have to have lists/deadlines or I get distracted and never get anything finished!

Week One: Kitchen/Laundry Room/Dining Room

Thankfully, we finished installing the kitchen & laundry room floors in September. I’m bummed that I won’t get to enjoy them for as long as I thought I would, but they have made such an impact to that area! I hope the next homeowners will love them as much as I do.

I can’t believe we finally have new floors in the kitchen! We’ve came so far on this kitchen. You can read about the changes we’ve made here, here, and here. And if you’ve forgotten what it looked like when we first started…

And here it is today!

After bringing home sample after sample of flooring for months, we finally decided on porcelain tile. And I love it; although it about killed us!

It took me three days to hammer, I mean, remove the old ceramic tile! 300 square feet of tile in three days = one sore gal!

Here I was at 299 1/4 square feet to go…

Some spots would just pop up with very little effort, but for the most part, it was like this:

and this…

And when it would crack, the edges would shatter into hundreds of tiny shards of ceramic! I figured out real quick to cover the tiles I was working on, as I had to have Mr. use tweezers to get a tiny piece of ceramic out of my arm when he got home the first day! (I used one of his old t-shirts to cover the tiles and then just threw it away when I wasdone.)

Hank was a big help and supervised as I scraped the thin set off the floors once I got all the tiles up.

Then it was time to install; and time to watch a lot of YouTube videos! Like everything else we do, we were going in pretty blind and clueless. We borrowed a wet saw from Mr.’s cousin, but it was old and tired; so we, of course, had to buy a new one. $$ But let me tell you, this is one awesome saw! We were tile cutting wizards by the time we were done!

I wanted the floors to have a wood floor look, with different sizes of planks, so we cut the tile planks in random lengths. (no rhyme or reason) It made for extra time to lay the floor, but it was so worth it. Mr. did 99% of the floor, and he did such a great job!!

But here’s proof that I did 1% of laying the floor. 🙂

Here’s Mr. doing his Michael Jackson impression! (he may or may not have needed stitches! I don’t know…I didn’t look!) But I should have bejeweled his glove!

We had a couple of places where the thinset got carried away and made it’s way up the sides of the tile. I used a grout remover tool and scraped it down. I put a couple of pieces of painters tape on each side. That way if I slipped while scraping, it wouldn’t scratch the tile.

And once again, Hank is supervising me while I removed the grout haze.

My heart sunk at one point when I thought we had cracked the tile while moving the washer around in the laundry room! #OhCrapMoment #JustRealisticLookingTile

I’m so happy with our floor. It’s amazing how it changed the looks of the kitchen! And by doing it ourselves, we saved over $3,000! Even with buying a new wet saw.

One more before and after…

I’m so glad to be finished so I can finally get rid of all the dust in the house!

I’m back after a three month absence and have lots to share with you, and am so excited about the first project I have to show you!

If you read this post, you’ll remember this initially started out as a four drawer chest of drawers that somehow ended up looking like this after our move from Oklahoma to Houston!

Not wanting to give up on using this piece somewhere in our house, I moved it into the kitchen and laid the leftover piece of quartz from our countertops on top of it. I wanted to make sure there was enough room in the kitchen and to see if we would really use it enough to justify a kitchen island. There was and we did!

So I got to work! I removed the front piece between where the top and second drawer should be and the bottom trim piece. They didn’t fit the look I was going for.

I then had to fill in LOTS of scratches, dings, and holes with wood filler; even rebuilding a corner that had been knocked off on one of the drawers. Mr. added beadboard to the sides and back that was leftover from our backsplash we installed back in February. He also cut out a shelf to go above the top drawer.

I primed and painted the chest and the drawers with a white enamel and added hardware that matched our kitchen cabinets. I painted the outer sides of the drawers a fun color (same as the kitchen desk) and lined them and the shelf with the cute paper that I’m lining the bottom kitchen cabinets with. We had the edges of the quartz top smoothed & polished and glued it on using Liquid Nails.

But who knew that the little towel rods on the sides would be the hardest items to find! I wanted something that wasn’t big or that would stick out. We went to several stores with no luck! I searched online with no success! The closest I had found was a special order drawer pull at Home Depot for $20! That was what I had paid for the entire chest at the auction!! We finally found what I was looking for at Ikea. Two for $7.99! Score! They were perfect to hang my towels Mr. bought me in Galveston!

This gives me a place to store my plastic containers and lids, my crock with my cake decorating spatulas, a few of my cookbooks, and those cute whale measuring cups that my daughter gave to me at Christmas!

It took me the entire five months to decide what I wanted. I bought tile after tile samples, brought them home, and held them up to the walls. I just didn’t get that “this is it” feeling. Then I saw what I wanted on Pinterest. And as soon as I saw it, I got that “this is it” feeling!! 🙂 A beadboard backsplash would go great with the coastal look I was bringing into the house!

And let me tell you, the price was fantastic!

2 – 4 x 8 beadboard = $40

2 – tubes Liquid Nail = $6

2 – 8′ pine trim = $24

1 – pkg. brads = $5

paint & primer = $0 (leftover from previous project)

caulk = $0 (leftover from previous project)

Even if we would have had to purchase paint, primer, and caulk, we could have installed the entire backsplash for around $120! Mr. was super excited about the price AND the fact that he got to buy a new cordless nail gun! 🙂

I found a great tip on how to cut out the holes for the outlets on ellaclaireinspired.com. A little tape and viola, the holes were marked! So much easier than using a tape measure, especially when you have three cutouts in one piece of board!

Mr. recently added the pendant lights over the sink and the desk, where the recessed lights were before. We used a conversion kit that takes literally minutes to install and what a difference it makes!

And how cute are these whale measuring cups that I got for Christmas from our daughter! Love, love, love them!

And everyone should have a quirky magnet collection on their fridge! 🙂 Ours are from places Mr. and I have visited and a couple are from our daughter and her roommate.

I am thrilled with the way the backsplash turned out!

And of course, I have to remind you of what we started with two years ago and how far we’ve come!

My daughter and her roommate live in an apartment with a fairly small kitchen. She’s had apartments before with bigger kitchens and one with a very small kitchen. But no matter how big the kitchen is, I think it’s the amount of storage that matters. Today’s post is the last in my daughter’s series of “Organizing Small Spaces” and she is talking about a couple of ways they maximize the space in their kitchen. If you missed her any of her other posts in this series, be sure and catch up HERE, HERE, and HERE.

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Kitchen: Maximizing kitchen space is difficult because often times you are stuck with what you have and integrating baskets or helpful organizational items is difficult. One of our tips is to keep dishes clean as much as possible. We make use of leftovers as often as we can, especially when it comes to taking lunch to work, so we go through a lot of Tupperware and to-go containers. We used to think that we didn’t have enough to keep up with our storage needs before we realized how many were sitting in the fridge with uneaten leftovers for a week or two longer than they should have. We found that, if we were honest with ourselves about what we would eat and cleaned out the fridge often, we had plenty of containers. And let’s be honest here—drying the containers is our absolute least favorite thing to do. It takes up so much time! So the fewer Tupperware containers we have to dry, the better!

What’s the catch, then? You have to keep up with your dishes and clean them out often. In the same way that doing dishes often allows you to live with four plates instead of eight or with six forks instead of twelve, doing dishes often allows you to save space by using only a handful of to-go containers instead of taking up an entire cabinet space with a 40-piece set you saw on sale at Target. The same is true of all of your kitchen utensils. It might be annoying at first to do dishes more often or run the dishwasher every other night instead of once a week, but it saves space and time when you get down to it.

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Just recently, I sorted through all my plastic containers and threw out any that didn’t have matching lids or bottoms. I was surprised at the amount that didn’t have mates and were just taking up space! Although I do have to confess…I bought some new Sterlite plastic containers a couple of weeks ago. They are freezer, microwave, and dishwasher safe, as well as BPA-free. They have easy snap-on lids with vents and each lid/bottom is color coded! That way you know exactly which lid goes to which bottom.

I hope she has given you some helpful tips these last several weeks. If you missed any of her past organizing posts, you can read them here, here, and here.

You know that saying, “Someone’s trash is another’s treasure”? Well, this is my trash and hopefully my next treasure.

A few years ago, we picked up a small, 4 drawer chest of drawers at an auction that we went to on Monday nights. I initially was going to paint it and use it as a table in my entryway at our previous house in Oklahoma. But before that could happen, we were packing up and moving to Houston! And for some odd reason, once we arrived in Houston, the top two drawers had disappeared and cardboard adorned the top 1/3! I suppose this is the consequences of a company being in charge of your move, as some things are never quite the same when they come off the semi on move-in day. But hopefully, our moving days are over for awhile.

Anyhoo, I’ve been wanting an island in my kitchen and I believe this little chest of drawers will fit the bill. Now my kitchen isn’t super wide and the online kitchen “experts” state you should have at least 36 – 48 inches of walk space around your island. One website said that if you don’t have at least eight feet (96 inches) of walk space, “don’t even think about an island!”. My kitchen “walk space” is 6′ 9″ (81 inches) from one side to the other. So theoretically, my island can only be 9 inches wide with a 36″ walk space! Well…that’s not going to work! Therefore, I’m thinking if I put wheels on the island, I can just move it out of the way when I’m not using it! Problem solved! (and if you read this post, you’ll remember that I did what the “experts” said not to! Which by the way is still holding up wonderfully.)

And for the top of the island, we have a piece of quartz left over from where they did the cutout for the cooktop when we had our countertops installed.

Enough yada yada yada, I’m sure you’re just dying to see this lovely chest of drawers which I want to miraculously transform into my new kitchen island!